Good Family

by Terry Gamble

  Philip pulls off his hat. Either he has gotten caught in the rain or is sweaty with humidity because his wildly curly hair is plastered to the top of his head. There is a priestly quality to Philip having to do with his black-Irish genes—a whiff of Erin go bragh and Father forgive me. “Maddie,” he says, nodding as if he just saw me last week. “Good trip?”

  Before I can answer, he turns to Dr. Mead. I expect him to firmly request a change in the treatment, to say with pastoral conviction that something should be done, that this whole sorry mess was because of doctors in the first place. Instead, he says, “Enough’s enough, don’t you think?”

  Philip rarely speaks without careful consideration of his words. Words, like money, should be sparingly allotted rather than spent, lest they become as unruly as his nemesis hair.

  Dr. Mead brings her coffee to her lips, sips it daintily. “It’s your decision,” she says, looking at each of us. “Yours and Evelyn’s.”

  Flinching at the implication, I back-paddle frantically. “It’s just that I’m not going to be here in Sand Isle very long, Dr. Mead.”

  “No?” she says to me, her eyebrows heading north in a familiar way that gives me the willies. “You might want to reconsider that.”

  The alliance I formed with Dr. Mead evaporates like the steam from her coffee. It is my sister’s turn to suppress a smile.

  Our porch sits high in the trees. Maples, mostly. An occasional curly-leafed oak. Below, the hill falls away to the beach—a sandy dune anchored by Virginia creeper, poison ivy, and blackberries. Mixed in are the sunflowers and lilies and black-eyed Susans our great-grandmother once planted, attempting a garden down to the beach. That’s when there were three gardeners to tend it, cutting back the overgrowth, trimming the trees, repairing the boards in the walk that switchbacked to the shore.

  Dana has been in a foul mood for the last hour because the cook she has hired called to say she won’t be available, that there is a family illness. “A better offer, more like it,” Dana says. These days, we have only the yardman who sweeps, and the flowers and boardwalk have all but disappeared.

  “We should trim those trees,” Philip says.

  “Amen,” I say.

  “And what will that cost?” says Dana.

  But I agree with Philip. The view is the most spectacular feature of this house. You can see the whole bay, the lights of Chibawassee, and to the right, the open lake—a glacier-carved gash of blue in the middle of the industrial wasteland and cornfields of the Midwest.

  “So,” I say, “shall we tell Mother?”

  We are all three sitting in rocking chairs, staring at the lake in a perfect line as if we are onstage, looking back at the audience. It’s five in the afternoon. Mother, as usual, is sleeping. In years past, this would be her cocktail hour. She would have napped from three to five, risen and made a drink, started to get dressed for the evening. Now the naps merge into other naps, semiconsciousness into sleep.

  Philip takes a long, contemplative sip of beer, but says nothing. Dana shifts her weight. She is uncomfortable with the notion of taking our mother off all medication except painkillers. It is unclear to me if it’s religious conviction or that she doesn’t want to let Mother go. Dana converted to Catholicism when she married Philip, and though I don’t think of her as fervent, she seems to express more zeal than Philip, who describes himself as lapsed.

  “You want her to go on like this, Dane?” I say. “What kind of life is this? Lying up there like that, having everything done for her. It’s one thing when you’re a baby and you’re cute, but this is a horror story—”

  “Oh, thank you very much,” says Dana, interrupting me. “Thank you for explaining to me just how awful the situation is, and how ghastly Mom’s life is, and what it takes to care for her and do the things that have to be done, and resist the urge to put her down like a dog.”

  I take a long, calming breath. “Fine, fine, fine.” I do not want to argue with her—not really. Besides, Dana’s righteousness always trumps mine. She is the designated repository of virtue in this house, the good daughter who stayed home. I, on the other hand, left years ago, and thus saved my life. Were Dana any less virtuous, any less responsible, it would not have been possible for me to do so. This I know—not because of any personal insight on my part, but because it was pointed out to me by my therapist, Dr. Anke.

  “Besides,” I say, “it’s not as though we’re pulling the plug. Just no more heroic efforts. It’s what she wants.”

  Philip clears his throat. “Will she get plenty of morphine?”

  I can never be sure what Philip’s position is on any of our family. Does he regard my mother as a burden? Me as an annoyance? The cousins he endures every summer the way he endures inclement weather on the lake. Yet I believe that, lapsed or not, his concern about my mother is sincere, that his musings about morphine aren’t malevolent in any way.

  “Who’s going to tell the cousins?” Dana says.

  The cousins. I have purposefully avoided asking who’s coming and when, as if my lack of interest renders more probable my exiting sooner rather than later. “I think we should tell Mother first.”

  We all three start to rock in unison. It is late afternoon, and no one has done anything about dinner. Miriam is upstairs tending Mother. No one else is going to help us. There are some eggs in the refrigerator and a wilted head of lettuce. My offer to make scrambled eggs and salad is gratefully accepted by my sister and brother-in-law.

  “I’ll go to the market tomorrow,” I say.

  “I’ll try to find another cook,” says Dana.

  “Forget it, Dane. We’ll do it ourselves. We’ll make a list about who does the shopping, the cooking, the cleanup,” I say to Dana as the sunset bleeds out. “Charts. Matrices,” I add with a flourish. “A whole organizational system of labor rotation.”

  Philip slaps a mosquito and eyes me warily, gauging the distance between sarcasm and sincerity.

  My sister’s eyebrow rises again. Dana can practically conduct a symphony with her eyebrows alone. “Adele?” she says.

  “Depending on the incarnation,” I say, holding up my hand like the open palm of Buddha, “even her.”

  I’m ’m staying,” I say to Ian in the phone at the foot of the stairs.

  “I knew this would happen,” he says. “I knew it.”

  His voice burbles for a moment, as if he is underwater. Then I hear honking and sirens in some far-off place—discordant in contrast to the rustling leaves, the trilling bells on the horses of Sand Isle.

  “Where are you?” I say.

  “Forty-fourth and Madison.” More honking, and I hear Ian say “sorry” to someone, not me. He might as well have said Forty-fourth and Jupiter. “So let’s clarify this point. You get there. In about two minutes, you’re climbing the walls. You can’t breathe. You can’t think. And now everything’s cool?”

  I drop my voice. “Dana needs me. And we’re taking Mom off the blood-pressure medicine. The Coumadin. Everything.”

  There is a long, static-y pause at the other end, and I wonder if we’ve lost the signal. Finally, Ian says, “You’re letting her go? Just like that?”

  But Ian should know all about letting go. Let go and let God. How many times had we heard it at AA meetings—the sanctimonious if correct response to our shared frustration about the inability to control our lives? Ian calls his higher power Betty. Let go and let Betty, he says.

  “Yeah.”

  “This makes me very, very uncomfortable.”

  “You?” I’m indignant. “She’s not your mother.” But having listened to me describe them in detail over the years, Ian has always felt proprietary about my family.

  “Maddie,” he says, “this makes me very sad.”

  And I realize that’s what I’ve been trying to get to. The sadness of it all. My father is dead, and my mother is dying, and none of this is going to last. All the clichés like This Too Shall Pass really are true, and I hate it, because it means the good
as well as the bad. You have to feel it, and I never wanted to, none of us did, anything but that. So here’s Ian, a thousand miles away, on the way to pick up his corned-beef-and-rye. I can see him now. His Adam’s apple going up and down, his pale Lutheran hair thinning, his narrow shoulders stoically immune to any attempt at getting buff. He is dodging someone on the sidewalk, graceful as a dancer in the coursing midtown river, a universe away, but essentially here and with me in this gloomy, old dining room, explaining to me the best he can that my mother’s death evokes sorrow.

  “Thank you, Ian,” I say as I hang up the phone.

  THREE

  As I unload bags of groceries onto the kitchen counter, Dana tells me who is coming and when. On the wall in front of me is my cousin Derek’s drawing of Louisa, childhood nurse and guru of the kitchen, long dead, sorely missed. I make a note to construct a little shrine to Louisa before the cousins arrive, something involving chocolate chips and butter. I have gone to the IGA grocery, where I have found and chosen to ignore plastic-wrapped produce as withered as the lettuce in our refrigerator. Instead, I have loaded up on toilet paper and cereal, six-packs of Ensure, and the strawberry-flavored Snapple that Miriam drinks, bottle after bottle, saying, Sweet Jesus. This weather.

  Jessica’s coming tomorrow, Dana tells me. In her voice, I hear resignation, trepidation, even longing. I want to ask about Jessica’s current state of mind and if the two of them are talking again. Instead, I ask about Adele, object of Ian’s fascination. Older than I by ten years, Adele—the most beautiful of the cousins—married young and frequently.

  “Open-ended,” says Dana, telling me that Adele’s current incarnation doesn’t allow for making plans.

  “What about Sedgie?”

  “Maybe. Maybe not.”

  Sedgie has had a tenuous career in the theater. Now he is going through his second divorce, though this one, like my marriage, hardly counted, so brief was it, so obviously influenced by cocaine and a rebound from the actress he’d lived with for seven years.

  “Why didn’t he just marry that actress?” I say.

  “If he’d married the actress,” Dana says evenly, “he’d be on his third divorce.”

  I stare at the can of Campbell’s soup I hold in my hand. “Have you ever read these labels?”

  Still, mushroom soup goes with everything, and I’m determined to make this cooking process seamless and not too taxing. Ian calls the Midwest “The Land of Creamy Mushroom and Mayonnaise,” and as if to prove his point, I’ve bought three bags of Ruffles potato chips and dip to match.

  “Who else?”

  Derek on Wednesday, she tells me, with or without his French wife. I try to focus on the small-print recipe for creamy mushroom chicken thighs. Derek, artist, seer of cousins, translator of truth and beauty, real or imagined, maker of worlds. His name still evokes in me a mixture of giddiness and nausea.

  “But Beowulf, for sure,” Dana adds, referring to Derek’s ostentatiously named son.

  It strikes me again how much time is spent at Sand Isle discussing people and their plans—not only those of our family, but the arrivals and departures, the ramifications and nuances of our friends’ and neighbors’ lives.

  As if she is reading my mind, Dana says, “You remember Larry Hobson? He’s getting divorced.”

  I haven’t seen Larry Hobson for years. Still, that anybody other than someone from our family should get divorced on Sand Isle attracts my keen interest.

  “Why?” I ask against my will, not wanting to be drawn back in, but fascinated, nonetheless. “Surely no one’s having an affair with Larry Hobson?”

  Dana shrugs. “His wife is asking for the cottage.”

  “The Hobsons’ cottage? She’s crazy. It’ll never happen.”

  “Things change,” says Dana, ominously. “You wouldn’t believe the things that are happening.”

  “Try me.”

  “The Dusays, for instance.”

  The name sounds familiar. “The Midland Dusays?” I say, suggesting a family from downstate whose fortune was made from plundering farmland to erect brightly colored, postmodern shopping malls.

  My sister nods. “Richer than God. They’ve built a huge house. Huge. Tore down the Bakers’ place and the Hewetts’.”

  “And built something new?”

  Nothing new has been erected in Sand Isle since 1890. I’m alarmed it could happen.

  “Totally mansionized,” says Dana.

  “Is it”—I look at her slyly—“tasteful?”

  Tasteful is one of our code words. Our aunt Pat taught us this. She would say, “NOCD” for “not our class, dear,” or categorize a wedding present of indeterminate description as a “Shovunda”—meaning it should be “shoved under” a bed. She could assess decor with a beady eye and dismiss someone’s efforts by saying, Lovely drapes.

  “Jamie’s here,” Dana says. She says it as casually as she would have said, Mail’s here, but I am not deceived. It is her way of testing the water, using her toe before jumping in.

  “Well,” I say, using my own forced version of a casual tone, “why wouldn’t he be?” Jamie’s family, after all, has been here almost as long as ours. Jamie of the colorless hair and chiseled face. “Still married?”

  “Still is.”

  “Two kids, is it?”

  “Three.”

  I silently ponder the tastefulness of having three children.

  “Philip says everything’s changing,” Dana goes on.

  Snapping the last of the paper bags shut and flattening it out, I remember Louisa once saying, Oh, nothing much changes around here.

  Dana picks forensically at the edge of the kitchen table where the swirly blue veneer has started to lift and curl. “We should probably do something about this linoleum.”

  I think, Oh, please don’t start with the fixing up. It’s been peeling for decades. No one has bothered to replace it. Although we have our inheritance, it is not so huge that we might want to fling it away on dry rot and cracked linoleum. And there is a generalized family aversion to gainful employment. Certainly no one has gone into the family business for generations. Addison & Sons has as little to do with us as the Scottish town from which our ancestors came. All we have is this name—like petrified wood, stone hard and calcified, long after the wood has rotted.

  By midafternoon, I have dusted and swept the living room, the dining room, the porch, as well as the deck. I’ve pulled my hair straight back and dug up an apron my mother gave Louisa, KISS THE COOK emblazoned on the front. Don’t even try, Louisa used to say, waving us away, dodging our lips, but she rarely took that apron off.

  The kitchen seems beyond my capabilities, so I have moved on to the downstairs bedrooms. In point of fact, I have little aptitude for this work. I have gleaned what skill I have from watching housekeepers over the years or by Ian explaining to me about working top down. Ceiling to floor. Dust first, sweep last.

  When my grandmother was alive, I shadowed the housekeeper as she cleaned, carried along by the smell of lemon oil and beeswax. Did I, like most children, think that my world would always smell the same? A stock simmering in the kitchen, the smell of biscuits. After my grandmother died, the men started smoking cigars. It thrills me still to pick up that scent evoking afternoons when the ladies were napping and the children were left alone.

  At night, the heady perfume of my mother and the aunts, the talcum of my grandmother. Even today, the smell of mildew, like that of bourbon, is as viscerally charged as one of baking popovers or chocolate cake.

  I move on to the Love Nest, so called after my cousin Adele and her first husband, Stephen, took the guest room off the living room—a peculiar choice since the walls were thin, and anyone staying up for bridge or Parcheesi could hear the little groans behind the door. I run my duster across a bureau, one that has been painted so many times the drawers can be opened only by bracing one’s legs and tugging hard. Every surface is cluttered with a potential yard sale of knickknacks. Crocheted doil
ies anchored by porcelain boxes and figurines. Ashtrays and ivory brush sets, tattooed with unreadable monograms.

  On the desk by the window I find a box with decoupaged lid—a relic of my mother’s efforts in summers past. A large letter A from a children’s book (two elves dancing cheek to cheek) is glued to the center, around which ladybugs and mushrooms, butterflies and pixies are arranged in an artful composition. You have to cut the paper like so, my mother said when I expressed an interest, showing me how to hold the scissors at an angle in such a way as to shear a perfect edge. Each leaf, each lock of hair had to be precisely separated from the background so that it could be lifted, glued into place, and varnished over. Once, I saw my mother cry after the scissors slipped and the wing of a butterfly she’d been working on for half an hour fell to the floor.

  Lifting the lid, I find postcards and newspaper clippings along with parchment-fine stationery with a faded scrawl. I pick up one of the letters.

  Dearest Sarah, the ancestral cursive begins in a correspondence from my great-grandmother to a friend. Let me tell you about the house.

  I sit on the edge of the mattress—a saggy invertebrate that barely holds me.

  We placed the schooner you shipped from England upon the mantelpiece. The boys are delighted with the rigging lines and the tiny ship lantern, but I fear they shall break them in their zeal.

  I remember that ship in a forlorn heap, my mother’s efforts in the sixties at “brightening.”

  We are going to call the cottage “The Aerie,” sitting as it does high up on the bluff over the beach. We are surrounded by dunes and a clutch of oaks out of which I can carve a cutting garden. Lilies and Passion Roses. Bachelors’ Buttons and Cosmos. Edward is having a wooden walkway built down to the beach so that we can comb for rocks. Your Clarence would be amazed to see the Devonian fossils, and could certainly hold forth on the fauna of the Pleistocene. Edward promises to teach me how to use the canoe. And, Sarah, did I tell you we have a piano?